Mark Carey specializes in environmental history and the history of science. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Davis, and held a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Geography department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Carey's research has focused on several topics: climate change, glacier-society interactions, natural disasters, mountaineering, water, and health/medicine. His goal is to understand dynamic interactions among people, knowledge systems, environmental perceptions, and natural processes. Carey's interdisciplinary research links many fields -- from history and geography to glaciology and climatology, medicine and recreation.

His research is currently funded by a major five-year National Science Foundation CAREER grant on "Glaciers and Glaciology: How Nature, Field Research, and Societal Forces Shape the Earth Sciences." This project examines the global history of human-glacier interactions, from the Alps and Andes to Greenland and Antarctica. Carey's research has for well over a decade also focused on Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range to analyze the societal effects of glacier retreat. This work has examined (1) glacier hazards such as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs, or aluviones in Peru) and avalanches, and (2) the use and management of water in the Santa River watershed that carries a significant amount of glacier runoff from the shrinking ice. Additionally, he has published on Andean mountaineering history, historical climate perceptions in the Caribbean and Barbados in particular, climate therapy and health resorts in the Andes, and conservation and indigenous people's land use in Nicaragua.

Carey's book, In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society, was published in 2010 by Oxford University Press. It won the Elinor Melville Prize for the Best Book in Latin American Environmental History, awarded by the American Historical Association's Conference on Latin American History. One of his articles, "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species," won the Leopold-Hidy Prize for the best article in the journal Environmental History during 2007. For a full list of publications see below or visit his research website with more on his publications< span>.

RESEARCH GROUP AND COLLABORATIONS

Carey is a co-founder and co-director of the Transdisciplinary Andean Research Network (TARN; Red de Investigación Transdisciplinaria Andina). TARN is run by a diverse interdisciplinary team that includes Michel Baraer (Université du Québec), Jeff Bury (UC Santa Cruz), Adam French (UC Berkeley), Bryan Mark (Ohio State), Jeff McKenzie (McGill University), and Kenneth Young (University of Texas, Austin).

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

Carey currently has several ongoing research projects, including:

Encounters with Ice: How Glaciers Changed the World and Captured Our Imagination. This book project funded by his NSF CAREER grant analyzes the history of human-glacier interactions over the last two centuries, showing how and why glaciers captured people's imagination, shaped societies, and affected the evolution of various earth sciences, such as climatology and geology.

Hydrologic Transformation and Human Resilience to Climate Change in the Peruvian Andes. This is a three-year, million-dollar National Science Foundation grant on climate change and water management in Peru. It is a collaborative project with glaciologist Bryan Mark at Ohio State University, geographer Jeffrey Bury at the University of California, Santa Cruz, bio-geographer Kenneth Young at the University of Texas, Austin, and geo-hydrologist Jeff McKenzie at McGill University. Read more about this project in a recent issue of the journal Nature or in the February 2013 issue of EcoAmericas.

Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Carey is currently a contributing author to Working Group II for the fifth IPCC assessment report due out in 2014. He is working in particular on detection and attribution of climate change impacts (Chapter 18).

Mountaineering in South America. Carey has a book-length project on the history of mountaineering in the South American Andes. It builds on his previous work on the mountaineering-scientific activities of the German and Austrian Alpine Club in the Peruvian Andes since the 1930s, published in the Hispanic American Historical Review.

Climate Therapy and Tuberculosis Health Resorts in South America. This book project examines sanatoria established to cure tuberculosis in alpine Andean areas from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. It explores the evolution of climate therapy to heal patients, and it takes a comparative approach across national contexts in Chile, Peru, and Argentina.

STUDENTS, TEACHING AND MENTORING

An important part of Carey's research is the involvement of undergraduate students. Thanks to grants from the National Science Foundation, Carey has been able to give students valuable research opportunities on a variety of topics over the years -- from field work in Peru, to library and web research, to website design for disseminating research results.In 2013, for example, Environmental Studies major and Clark Honors College student Kelsey Ward (pictured with Carey at right) spent a month working with Carey's research team (TARN) in Peru.

Carey's courses in the Clark Honors College also provide unique opportunities for undergraduates, such as his Spring 2012 course on "Climate and Culture in the Americas" in which all students presented their research projects at a public national student conference Carey co-organized on "Indigenous Peples and Climate Change."

CLIMATE CHANGE AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLES INITIATIVE

Carey and co-organizer Kathy Lynn, director of the Tribal Climate Change Project and Environmental Studies researcher, have also established the UO Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples Initiative, with annual events for students and the university and Eugene communities including an April 2013 event to correspond with the Climate Change Research Symposium. Carey and Lynn have recently received a UO Williams Council grant to organize another student conference, teach two climate-related courses, and bring in both guest speakers and students from tribal colleges, which are all tentatively scheduled for Fall 2014.